1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to wireless networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
Known networks disadvantageously generally require a dedicated or central control node established apriori for managing resources in and access to the network, in addition to inflexible methods tied to the use of such an apriori infrastructure. IEEE 802.11 standard and many other standard Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) use Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) technology. The collision avoidance mechanism employed by CSMA/CA adopts a random back-off period prior to each transmission. The random nature of the back-off reduces but does not eliminate the probability of collisions. In order to detect and recover from collisions, an acknowledgment mechanism must be used with each transmitted message; and for each retransmit attempt, the back-off period is randomly selected from an expanded contention time window using a binary exponential back-off scheme. Many published studies have shown that these random back-off and collision recovery schemes significantly compromise the performance of CSMA/CA WLANs in terms of access delay, delay jitter, and network throughput particularly as the number of stations and offered load increases. There is a need to for a more flexible and self-forming network and methods associated therewith that avoid the aforementioned drawbacks.